January 2011
7 posts
WatchInteresting discussion of the design behind Windows Phone 7. I liked Bill Buxton’s point about the benefits of having a well-defined design language:
When you have a well established language, you all of the sudden have some criteria to say here’s why not - because it clearly just doesn’t fit.
Via Channel 9
December 2010
0 posts
1 tag
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess →
Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals.
Is the idea behind Craigslist just so good that design and innovation don’t matter? What if...
November 2010
4 posts
1 tag
Ask E.T.: Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S) →
One design lesson here is that most interface design work should be done at actual final scale and all internal demos should be on actual hardware rather than on pitch slides or big monitor screens
This is a great point, and something that I need to remind myself of when designing web-based software on a 30” monitor. Not that I’m complaining about the 30” monitor…
(via Instapaper)
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“be mindful that employing skeuomorphs and realism in UI design gives you a set...”
– Is Realistic UI Design Realistic? | Aaron Weyenberg (via Instapaper)
1 tag
October 2010
0 posts
1 tag
Human landscapes in SW Florida - The Big Picture →
I love these images. Amazing patterns. This one is my favorite:
August 2010
1 post
1 tag
“…the vast majority of people won’t even notice your design. But the very act of...”
– An Interview with Neven Mrgan (Shawnblanc.net)
January 2010
3 posts
1 tag
In Retrospect: Several Hilarious Reactions to the...
If the reactions to the launch of the original iPod (and the subsequent domination of the device) are any indication of what the future holds for the iPad, then things look bright.
If the ipod is only the world’s most baddass MP3 player then I don’t know if I’m really going to stand in line to buy it, I have a cd walkman and a burner already (link)
I really wanted to like it....
We not only reduced our bandwidth, and how much we... →
Not privacy related, I thought this bit from TheRumpus’s article on Facebook privacy was particularly interesting:
…when we streamlined the browsing of photo albums, you know, where you can click ‘next’ above the photo, and the page stays the same except you get the next photo? We did tests on that, and actually found out it increased the number of page views by 77%, essentially...
Google Analytics Proxy →
I’ve forked Robby Russell’s Google Analytics Proxy implementation on GitHub and modified it to work without the Prototype JavaScript framework. I’m currently using jQuery for all if the JavaScript needs in my Rails apps, but still wanted to be able to use Robby’s simple method of tracking events in production, and writing to the log in development.
November 2009
2 posts
Notes from Mac programming class guest lecture →
Interesting tips on software development.
Last night I gave a guest lecture at Hal Mueller’s Mac programming class at the UW Extension. The idea behind the lecture was to talk about what makes a great Mac app. I took that as an excuse to…
1 tag
October 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Primary Colours →
I love the colors in this photo from FriskyPics
1 tag
Present Modal View Controller from Modal View...
What I wanted to do was to present a modal view controller in the viewDidAppear method of a different modal view controller. Specifically, I have a screen in my app that lets the user send a tweet. I’m using the MGTwitter engine with Ben Gottleib’s Twitter+OAuth. The tweet view is presented modally. When it appears, it checks to see if the user is authenticated, if not it...
July 2009
1 post
1 tag
Pro Git - Table of Contents →
A nice reference.
June 2009
2 posts
1 tag
LESS - Leaner CSS →
Less is Leaner css. Less extends cssby adding: variables, mixins,operations and nested rules.
I like the sound of this. I’m curious about performance and caching.
2 tags
jQuery TOOLS - The missing UI library for the Web →
Looks nice. I have a few ideas to use this on already.
April 2009
2 posts
WatchMatthew Childs’ 9 life lessons from rock climbing | Video on TED.com
Very cool to see some climbing talk at TED. If I had to add a #10 it would be to strategically push your limits. Often you’ll surprise yourself.
1 tag
March 2009
10 posts
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Understanding Git Conceptually →
Good overview of Git that focuses on understanding things “under the hood” instead of memorizing commands.
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The Three20 Project →
One by one I’ve been re-designing and re-factoring each of the components I wanted to open source, adding them to a new Xcode static library project, and then re-integrating them with the Facebook app. I just finished doing that a few days ago, and now I’m ready to start sharing the results.
Looks like it could be great.
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The Peekaboo Paradox - washingtonpost.com →
One of the more interesting articles I’ve read in a while. Also, one of the longer ones. Takes some surprising turns.
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Intervals — Interval Timer for iPhone and iPod... →
My first iPhone app is up on the App Store.
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Hacker News - Readability | userstyles.org →
I like Hacker News, but the site’s design just kills my eyes. All of the text is so small and so close together. To remedy this, I made a quick Sylish script to fix things up a bit. Granted, you get more headlines per screen with the original style, but for me, the new style is much quicker to scan. Check it out at the link above if you’re interested.
Here’s what it looks...
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iPhone Development: Debugging Part 2 →
Good tip on symbolic breakpoints. I’m giving this a shot right now.
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Wolfram Alpha →
The vision seems to be to create a system wich can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).
So which will be a bigger let down, Wolfram Alpha, or Cuil?
1 tag
Safari 4 Beta - Open Links in New Tab (Not a New...
The thing that’s been killing me the most with the new Safari 4 beta is not the funky titlebar embedded tabs, but the fact that targeted links open in a new window instead of a new tab. Luckily, running this line of code at the terminal (on a Mac) resolves that issue:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
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Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment →
One of my favorite links in a while. This bookmarklet removes all the clutter from pages leaving just the nicely formatted article text. I’ve been using this a lot tonight, and it works great. Highly recommended for cleaning up cluttered and ad ridden pages.
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iPhone SDK Examples →
Some nice, quick iPhone sdk code examples.
February 2009
9 posts
1 tag
Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams →
Good stuff.
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BWToolkit - Interface Builder Plugin for Cocoa on... →
An impressive looking set of Interface Builder additions.
2 tags
Scaling Rails - RailsLab →
A continuing series of short screencasts with details on how to scale Rails applications. Episodes so far include responsiveness, page caching, fragment caching and action caching.
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SitePoint » 5 Books For The Price of 1 →
Help Support The Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal and get a good deal on web design and development books from SitePoint.
2 tags
The League of Moveable Type →
Enough with the limitations of the web, we won’t have it. It’s time to raise our standards. Here, you’ll find only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts.
Only one font so far, but this could be a good resource if it grows.
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HTTP Basic Authentication "Logout" with... →
I’ve been struggling with this exact issue. Looking forward to trying this solution. To summarize, the solution to getting your app to “forget” the HTTP Basic credentials is to append a hash (#) to the end of the URLs that you are requesting data from.
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Quick Tip: Remove Gap Between iPhone Status Bar...
If you ever come across the problem in the image below where there is a small gap between the iPhone status bar and the navigation bar, add the following code to fix it:
[viewController.view setFrame: [viewController.view bounds]];
2 tags
Five Simple Steps ~ A book by Mark Boulton →
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great...
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tlvx: The technical story of Muxtape →
An interesting write up on some of the technical decisions behind Muxtape, including their decision to move from PHP to Ruby on Rails.
“How long do you think it would take to re-write the site in Rails?” “Umm, well..”, Cmd-T, “localhost:3000”, Enter, “It already is.”
January 2009
3 posts
2 tags
iPhone Memory Management Links and Resources →
Nice list of about 10 objective-c memory management articles and screencasts.
2 tags
Google Releases Objective C Toolbox →
A Google Objective-C “style guide”
Geometry libraries to manipulate NSRect, NSPoint, and similar.
Gradient-based shading code
Additions to NSBezierPath, including GCPath conversions, round rects, and shading
Login item manipulation (Mac specific)
gzip for NSData
XCode configurations
and.. a lot more, naturally.
1 tag
December 2008
5 posts
2 tags
Improve your jQuery - 25 excellent tips →
2 tags
HTTP Client - Mac Developer Tool for HTTP... →
A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages.
1 tag
Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa «... →
Could you paint a replica of the Mona Lisa using only 50 semi transparent polygons?
That is the challenge I decided to put my application up to.